All our lives most of us are searching for ourselves.

For who we are, what we should do, where we belong. We try to fill it by copying others, following others. Out through the world, in myriad places and faces we look for ourselves. Who am I?

We look for reflections in the approval of others. Oh, how well I know this. Looking to fill the you-shaped hole, the reflection of ourselves we can never see in any mirror or selfie. We are hungry, ravenous for approval… but do not realise that the approval of others will never fill that hole.

It is our own approval we seek. (Our own approval which is our inner allignment with and reflection of the sacred approval of life, of the divine, that we already have, always had.)

Like wasps to warm beer we crave it.

We are motivated to seek it.

And this second-hand approval is as good as it’s ever got. We crave its warmth, its heat, its light and sweetness. Seek it out in other substitutes when we don’t find it in the faces around us. Because it is the only pleasure we’ve been taught we’re allowed. The pleasure of being good, being accepted, acceptable, enough.

We are wired for pleasure. Our bodies light up from the inside with it.

And yet, in our twisted world, we are taught to resist and deny anything that sparks pleasure. We are taught to put that which makes us feel bad first.

We have been taught to be suspicious of pleasure. To see it as indulgent, superfluous, dangerous… if we have some we’ll want more. Pleasure will lure us in… and do us in.

And so we train ourselves to ignore pleasure, deny it, defer it. Hungrier and crazier we get. And all the while feel further and further from ourselves. Our pleasures become more twisted, more damaging of self and others, more compulsive and controlling, the more they are denied. We become twisted in a destructive spiral… the opposite of the life-affirming, pleasure-inducing, creative spiral which we long for.

Lack of pleasure = lack of self.

Lack of pleasure detaches us from ourselves, from others, from the world. Officially one in fifty of us suffers from depersonalisation disorder… but I’m sure the real figures are higher still.

Pleasure is the marker of self-recognition. The true mirror in which we see ourselves. It is the inner noting of external resonance. The indicator light that comes on to say – this is the You-shaped hole. Pleasure is the X marks the spot that we are all looking for all the time. The marker that says – YOU – you in your uniqueness are here. And this is what you love. This is what makes you feel good. This is where you belong. It is the signal that you are on the right path.